Thursday, 30 July 2009

Householders will earn up to £150 a year from recycling their rubbish under a scheme designed to reward those who put waste in the correct bins.

Which also means that it's a tax. All those £150s have to come from the tax payer, so if you don't do it, you'll be paying in to pay for those £150s and getting nothing back.

Microchips will be installed on wheelie bins, which will be scanned and weighed automatically as they are emptied into refuse lorries.

Councils will issue rewards based on the weight of recyclable waste collected from each home.

If they're going to weigh the amount of recyclable waste, isn't that then an incentive to get more recyclable waste? So, next time you go shopping, you'll ask for some bags which you can stuff into the box to get your weight up.

Some of the plastics will go to a plastic recyling facility in Dagenham, East London. Initially, the rewards will be in the form of vouchers redeemable at local shops. At a later stage, authorities may introduce cash payments or discounts on council tax bills.

So, it's not only a tax, but a handy way to get money out of people's hands to subsidise local shops.

Householders will be able to track their recycling levels and rewards online.

You can bet that's going to work well and be reasonably priced.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is holding talks with six boroughs that are interested in taking part in the trials. He believes that offering rewards will be much more effective than fines in reducing the amount of waste going to landfill.

Jesus. Offering a reward for good behaviour is exactly the same thing as fining someone for bad behaviour in a tax system. Each of those "good behaviour" rewards has to be paid for by the tax payer. So if you're not getting a "good behaviour" reward, then you are effectively being punished.

To keep the numbers simple... if you have 1000 households in a village, and 500 of them recycle then you need £75,000 to pay for the rewards. Which means that on average, a household has to pay in £75.

So, if you get the "good behaviour" reward, you paid in £75 and got £150. If you don't get the "good behaviour" reward, you paid in £75 and got £0. So, for not doing the "good behaviour" activity, you lose out by £75.

Isabel Dedring, the mayor’s environment adviser, said that the vouchers would be provided by retailers and local businesses, which would benefit from increased trade.

She said that councils were also likely to pass on to households some of the savings they will make from sending less waste to landfill sites. The landfill tax will rise to £48 a tonne next year, up from £40 a tonne this year.

Or alternatively, we could just leave the EU and get all of it back.

Last month the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead began a reward scheme under which householders receive points, which can be converted into retail vouchers, every time they leave out their garden waste wheelie bin. The points earned do not yet vary according to weight, but the total amount of garden waste collected has still risen sharply.

Applying any effort to recycling garden waste is just stupid. Drop it on a landfill and it will breakdown very quickly. I'd suggest that this is purely about avoiding the stupid landfill tax.